Celebrating Womanhood: How better menstrual hygiene management is the path to better health, dignity and business

On International Women's Day in 2013, Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Councilheld Celebrating Womanhood: Menstrual Hygiene Management, a unique event that brought together a wide and deep range of participants to focus on issues related to menstruation. The event provided a chance to forge new connections and to make the "unspeakable" topic speakable. As the report describes, menstruation is still a taboo issue and has been neglected within WASH and in the field of human rights, but research and promising approaches and partnerships are already underway.

71% of girls and women surveyed had no idea what was happening to them when they began to bleed. Teachers rarely teach menstrual hygiene, and even many junior doctors are not properly trained in it.
Tweet

Only 12% of girls and women have access to commercial sanitary products. Infections from using unsanitary rags for menstrual cloths are common.
Tweet

Sanitary products are disposed of wherever girls and women can do so secretly and easily -- usually the nearest open defecation field, river, or garbage dump.
Tweet

Menstrual hygiene is an issue of girl-child health, education, business, income generation, and sustainability. This case needs to be clearly made in order for it to receive greater attention and funding.
Tweet

More large-scale studies, information sharing, and collaboration are needed to improve the research landscape for menstrual hygiene.
Tweet

Published By

Copyright

Document Type

Language

This web page is marked up with Schema.org microdata. Much of the necessary microdata is embedded within the HTML that creates the display you see above. The data that shows below is formatted for machine-reading and rounds out the complete descriptive set for this resource. Want more info about all of this? Go here. You can also view the complete dataset for this resource the way a machine sees it here .